Document logs rotation and compression setup

[laeti-tia]

We had reports of disk space exhaustion in some hosts migrated to 5.0. Some users were reporting OpenSearch logs were not compressed and others reporting some Apache logs were not rotated.

We need more information to be able to debug this further. Maybe @rhclopes can give us more information.

[rhclopes]

Hi,

The logs are not compressed after rotation in

• /var/log/perfsonar/
• /var/log/pscheduler/
• /var/log/httpd/
• /var/log/messages

I have seen an increase in disk space usage of 1G a day with several perfsonar toolkit hosts and maddash hosts failing by running out of space.

It should an easy fix to correct logrotate to compress all files. Alternatively, advise admins to do so.

Regards,
Raul

[laeti-tia]

Thanks Raul, were these CentOS-7 systems? Upgraded from 4.4.x? Were the logs compressed before upgrade?

[rhclopes]

Hi Laetitia,

Yes, they are all ps 5 on CentOS7. In all cases, updated from perfSONAR 4.4.

Raul

[laeti-tia]

It is confirmed that on a 4.4.x CentOS7 host, the logs in those directories are not compressed:

/var/log/perfsonar/
/var/log/pscheduler/
/var/log/httpd/

The default CentOS7 logrotate.conf also has the compress setting commented out:

# uncomment this if you want your log files compressed
#compress

[arlake228]

Chatted about this and next action is to find best place to document how to enable compression on el7 or any other OS with it disabled by default.

[szymontrocha]

Do we recommend just enabling compress option for the whole system in logrotate.conf? Otherwise we would have to specify a specific logrotate config

[laeti-tia]

@szymontrocha Yes I think a general compression doesn't hurt. That's the way it's done by default on Debian and Ubuntu systems. That's also the way you save the most disk space.

[szymontrocha]

This may be as simple as the following FAQ entry:

Enabling log compression with logrotate.conf
Sometimes, log files can grow bigger and consume disk space even before their rotation. Logrotate is a system utility installed by default and is configured to handle log rotation for all installed packages and applications. In order to enable system-wide log files compression change default settings in /etc/logrotate.conf and uncomment compress option. This implies that rotated files will be compressed with log files having a .gz file extension.